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There are several steps involved in building a large scale web application. One of the most notoriously difficult steps of that process is deployment. Your engineering team will often face situations where code needs to be shipped quickly, and your production environment needs to update as soon as possible. In such an environment, the deployment process must be smooth enough to avoid disrupting user experience, but rapid enough to avoid downtime and preserve business goals.

The team at AppFog understands how important it is to have a strong architecture to support maintaining and scaling out your application, which is why they’ve built a tool that allows you to focus on writing code, while they handle the infrastructure related details. With AppFog, things like run time environments, load balancing, and reporting are no longer issues that require so much of your time. AppFog can even help you deploy your application seamlessly, regardless of how many users you have, or how big your deployments usually are.

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If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to provide your engineering team with an effortless deployment strategy, then a Blue-Green deployment methodology provided by AppFog may be right for you and your team.

What is the Blue-Green Deployment Methodology?

A known challenge involved in automated deployment is often referred to as “the cutover”, which refers to taking software from the final stage of testing to live production. The cutover needs to happen quickly, so that downtime is prevented or at least minimized. A Blue-Green deployment strategy allows for safe deployments by ensuring that your application has two separate production environments, as close to identical as possible. At any time, one of these environments is live, while the other receives no user traffic. If your ‘Blue’ environment is live, then your pre-deployment testing will take place on your ‘Green’ environment. Once your tests pass on the Green environment, you reroute your traffic from the Blue environment to the Green environment which now has the updated code that has passed all QA and other testing.

The Blue-Green deployment strategy allows for immediate rollbacks in case an error is found in the live environment, since you can simply reroute your traffic to whichever of your two identical production environments is inactive. You can read more about the Blue-Green deployment methodology here.

Continue reading %How to Set Up a Blue-Green Deployment Methodology with AppFog%

Source: SitePoint